Steve Bowbrick ruminates on the pace of unmanned planetary exploration, and if I read between the lines a little; the torrents of telemetric information and simulation that the next generation have access to (cf. access to the Maestro simulations of Mars rover data, and more way-out “Why Starfleet”)

“My kids – before they’re my age – will know Mars better than I know, say, Tasmania or Patagonia. They won’t have been there but they’ll feel like they have. If they’re paying attention (unlikely), they’ll also have a pretty detailed mental image of two or three of our Sun’s other planets, submarine images from Europa’s salty ocean and – maybe – reasonable pictures of half a dozen small-ish, blue-ish planets orbiting other stars. I suspect they’ll also know that the solar system – and the universe beyond it – are greener and more hospitable to life than we could ever have imagined and that there’s as much water (liquid and otherwise) on distant planets as there is here on earth. They’ll also have a pretty good idea how it got there.”

Deep joy to be had from subscribing to Melvin Bragg’s “In our time” newsletter, that supports the Radio4 show of the same name.

This week our hero, Melvin, describes having his mind blown early one morning by a bunch of physicists explaining string theory to him:

“Hello

This morning’s programme was a tough one for me. I gave up physics at
the age of 14 because the school to which I went was very small and at
that time, in the mid-Fifties, you had to make what proved to be
crucial decisions ridiculously early. I was also not much good at
physics.

About 15 years ago when, as I discovered like many people in my
generation, I saw that some of the most intense, vivid and beguiling
ideas around were to be found in general books about science, I tried
to get some sort of grip on what I had left behind quite happily at
the age of 14.

It’s proved to be extremely difficult and this morning was clearest
proof. Sometimes you hold on by your fingertips. Sometimes you hold
on by your fingernails. I was holding on by what could be called a
planck length which is so infinitesimal as to make the head of a pin
look like Wales.”

Read the full newsletter below:
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Visualised and placed in a periodic table. Absolutely lovely – especially the way the visualisations bring home the relationships and progressions in the table of elements.

Fantastic.

» The Periodic Table of the Fermi Surfaces of Elemental Solids [610k download]

Sci-fi staple, the parallel universe, examined by Sci. A lot to take in here even with Maciej’s excellent bullet-point summary:

“The first kind of parallel universe is an inevitable consequence of the fact that we seem to live in an open universe with a uniform distribution of matter. Because all energy is quantized, a given volume of space can only contain a certain (unbelievably huge) number of configurations of matter (unless you do something crazy like turn the temperature to infinity). In an infinite Universe like ours, that means any finite volume of space is bound to repeat itself somewhere. An infinite number of somewheres. You just have to be willing to travel. According to Tegmark, the nearest copy of yourself is about 10^(10^29) meters away (he declines to say in which direction). Finding the nearest copy of our entire visible Universe is more of a slog – it’s about 10^(10^181) meters away. There’s also every imaginable near-variant to be found – a mirror-Earth where you’re wearing a different colored shirt, a mirror-Earth with a monkey typing Shakespeare, an infinite number of mirror-Earths where Ann Coulter gets sacrificed to a volcano god tomorrow.”

» Idle Words: parallel universes

Abbas at Aula.cc exerpts this from Scientific American:

“…our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial dimensions, might instead be ’written’ on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram. Our everyday perceptions of the world as three-dimensional would then be either a profound illusion or merely one of two alternative ways of viewing reality.”

+++THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM THE HAND+++STAY ASLEEP+++YOU DID NOT SEE THE GIANT PEN THAT WRITES REALITY+++STAY ASLEEP+++

From an interview with E.O.Wilson, author of Consilience:

“Nematode worms, he says, account for four of every five animals living on Earth – and are so abundant that if the planet’s surface vanished, its “ghostly outline” could still be made out in the biomass of nematodes, almost all of species unknown.”

Fantastic.

» Harvard Magazine: E.O. Wilson: “Of Ants and Earth”
[via Aula]

—-
UPDATE: The “wormsphere” quote seems to be originally by N.A. Cobb in 1915. It’s a little longer, and if anything, a little more poetic:

“In short, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”

The Doors of perception website has posted a transcript of Neil Gershenfeld’s presentation on the work of MIT’s centre for Bits and Atoms.

“a paintable computer, a viscous medium with tiny silicon fragments that makes a pour-out computer, and if it’s not fast enough or doesn’t store enough, you put another few pounds or paint out another few square inches of computing.”

» Doors7: Neil Gershenfeld: “This is the revolution for us”
[via Andrew Otwell]